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After seven grueling years, I have finally finished this behemoth! It's been a long journey, and now that it's over, we all get to enjoy this product of much labor. 24 puzzle levels await you in here! Will you be able to solve them all? Probably.

This hold continues the story from Mysteries of the Deep. It is not necessary to play it, as I provide a recap of the events for those who want it. I fixed up the grammar in the recap, so it could be interesting to see it anyway.

Unintended solution for The Boiling Core: Entrance. After entering this room for the first time, exit via the stairs and go back to Tormel. Returning to the Boiling Core entrance results in the player having a sword (the incorrect role).

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In Tormel 1N, after you trigger the event where the guide pushes the guard to enter the mayor's house, if you exit the room (and not enter right away into the mayor's house) and re-enter it you cannot go there anymore because the guards are blocking the entrance, and the guide's house is locked, so you have to restore.

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There's not some other world out there where everything's gonna be okay. There's just this one, just this rock
-33th Skywatcher

quote:Jeff_Ray... wrote:
Yeah, I had marked them unscorable due to assuming that the player could just exit the room, but I had forgotten that the rooms had to be cleared first for the score to count...

I guess everyone has to have their stupid moment every once in a while...

Have you switched them to scoreable? Still showing up as "does not record high scores".

And post mastered. All in all a very enjoyable hold. Over two hundred puzzles, lots of story, and plenty of fun. I'm pretty sure I broke a few rooms and there was one backtracking issue in Flooded Crevasse (if you enter the 2nd secret room without conquering the 1st you will have to restore) but none of that detracted from my overall enjoyment of this hold. Why aren't more of you playing this? Outside of official holds you don't usually get this much quality content in one hold. And for those who care about these things, I've left a dozens of optimized #1's on the table. mxvladi...

I found a pretty interesting scripting bug I feel needs to be addressed:

If you leave The Boiling Core via the stairs in the entrance, go to a level where you can control Beethro, and then come back to The Boiling Core, you enter controlling Beethro. However, if you leave the Boiling Core via the stairs in the entrance and then enter it without visiting other levels, you enter as the Guide.

Homeward Adventure is a monumental hold that in any other puzzle series would stand on its own as a full game. It's hundreds of rooms long but there is no filler here - every puzzle has a unique mix of pieces or clever little room layout to figure out. The difficulty is moderate and carefully consistent throughout. The writing is great (mostly light-hearted humour) and punctuates the level changes appropriately. The post-mastery content includes some well thought out scripted additions with way more puzzle and combat potential than they get time for. There's so many moments of consideration for the player that I couldn't list them all, but just one neat example is using a build marker for already existing terrain to provide a glowing effect on the tile that triggers a scripted cutscene.

Neutral points worth mentioning: Around half of the levels were themed with specific elements, while the others were only cosmetically decorated and contained a mixmatch of puzzles. I enjoyed both but YMMV if you prefer either format. There's also a fairly high percentage of swordless puzzles, though these are spread out between disarmed Beethro and two alternate playable characters.

It's not flawless, but none of its blemishes are large enough to dwell on next to the huge quantity and quality of puzzles up for offer. (The ratio could take on TSS itself.) The only real criticism I have is that Homeward Adventure's plot does not conclude. At all. But that I even care about the plot puts it one-up over the other user holds I've played, so.

The plot was left on a cliffhanger to lead up to the next part of the series, The Plague of Poxipon. I can't give a good estimate on when that will be ready for release, since the scale of that hold currently rivals even Homeward Adventure's.

With that said, I'm really happy you enjoyed this hold. It took a long time to release it, but in the end it was quite worth it